The jubilation
of a crowd for
blood because
if the enslaved warriors in the arena
don’t kill each other the masses will turn
on the emperor. Bloody circus.
circuit of futility.
Turn the page.
Smell the rain.
Give the DI 25.
That’s the price of
Fame.
Just a tired old man
walking with the
Venus statue on a cart
beside him, that
came alive and
flew to heaven
on golden wings.
Court-martialed for failing
to do his utmost at Minorca
resistanceless
claw me doubt
the abbey flagrantly violates
the rules of iniquity
consume
agony
bitter
roots
of dissonance
between us
your love and my
essence or my
addiction and your
inequity
and you left
and you fled
you asked me not to
come along
“the opposite of desire is
confusion. No, the conflation
of contusion with
formaldehyde is the
theology of splendid
affirmation, dig.”
- Sergei Infantilov
Encyclical breath
hive mind
the holy water
got stuck in
Goshen’s piping,
no? But we continue
thumping the
pipes with bricks
and scorching their
undersides with torches
to unfreeze them,
and renew
the face of the
earth.
2.
Copper and ten percent
tin; your skin awaits the
sun’s decree of misery.
I wait in
the loggerhead
out back.
The tenterhooks
separate.
We are sprained.
3.
Gibeon strains
because gravity -
and belief - did not
fail despite the non-
revolution of the Earth
about the sun for several
hours that day. Physics
fails, and weeps on the
ground, coughing up
phlegm. Faith revives,
and walks to the beach
for a swim.
(plate 1)
Who would clamber Alexander’s path
must learn to move empires for the price of
a shrubbery.
(plate 2)
Archers shoot magical fireworks
across the lawn of the Library, to the delight
of the onlookers.
(plate 3)
The anthropologist sets himself up as high priest
to mediate the wonders and evils of technology
to the indigenous people he studies, and to protect them,
and his reputation and tenure, from us, God as wealthy
landowner full of that hatred called love.